


Whisper

by nagi_schwarz



Series: Foxtrot [6]
Category: Stargate Atlantis, The Dollhouse - Fandom
Genre: Dollhouse-level non-con, F/M, M/M, not actually RPF
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-21
Updated: 2016-01-21
Packaged: 2018-05-26 07:14:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,486
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6228823
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nagi_schwarz/pseuds/nagi_schwarz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for the <a class="i-ljuser-profile" href="http://comment-fic.livejournal.com/profile"><img class="i-ljuser-userhead"/></a><a class="i-ljuser-username" href="http://comment-fic.livejournal.com/">comment_fic</a> prompt: "Any, any, sensory stimulation." Dozens of imprints, dozens of kinks, fetishes, and desires, and Foxtrot John Sheppard discovers one of his own, and it's triggered by none other than Rodney McKay. References to SGA episodes The Long Goodbye and The Shrine.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Whisper

After the unmitigated disaster that was John thinking he could take on an extra imprint in the form of Thelan (nope, not an imprint, something alien and beyond Earth tech), John decided that maybe suppressing all of the other imprints and constantly fighting to stay on top was a bad idea, especially since when things had gotten really bad for him, imprints had taken over, and he couldn't afford to let that happen, not in the middle of a battle with the Wraith or Genii when John Sheppard's expertise was needed most.

The thing about imprints was that, while they were complete personalities, they weren't people. They were designed to be active when called upon and to otherwise sit on the shelf, so they didn't try to take over John's body out of boredom. However, after a year and a half of being ruthlessly suppressed (after being suddenly and unexpectedly awakened), they were interested in the world around them, in understanding what they were and who they were and what had gone on since they'd gone to sleep, as it were.

John had an eternal peanut gallery that was less with unhelpful, teasing comments designed to make him nervous and more with curiosity and sudden bouts of knowledge, desires, and habits that came out of nowhere.

When John was in the lab with Rodney and Rodney did something to upset Zelenka, the diplomatic translator (and sometime boy-toy of a deeply closeted but fabulously wealthy UN delegate) cracked up at the stream of curses that fell from Zelenka's lips as he stormed out of the room.

"What's so funny?" Rodney demanded.

John wiped the grin off his face immediately. "Nothing. Sorry. Just - Zelenka's ears turn pink when he gets upset. Now, what did you need help initializing?"

As a soldier, John had learned to be careless about his taste in coffee, because coffee on military bases was notoriously bad, and caffeine was a necessity when one was flying emergency missions in the middle of the night. The architect with the photographic memory, however, was a coffee snob to put Rodney to shame. The first time John tasted some of the coffee from the beans grown illicitly (but Lorne-approved) by the botanists in greenhouse three, he couldn't stop the happy little moan that escaped him.

"John, are you all right?" Teyla asked, alarmed.

Ronon chuckled and continued wolfing down his breakfast.

"It's just coffee," Rodney snapped. "If you like it so much, get a room." (He was cranky because he'd upset the botanists and they'd cut him off from their coffee, and he wasn't quite desperate enough to try the stuff that came out of Little Tripoli.)

John swallowed down the automatic apology on his lips and marshaled up some indignation. "I had a long night, all right? This coffee is very, very welcome."

Rodney hmphed and went back to his breakfast.

So John stumbled along, learning to school his features into impassivity whenever one of the imprints perked up in interest at something. If he could, he'd indulge them - nicer coffee, listening to the foreign scientists chatter in their own languages, sometimes dancing alone in his room to music that was frankly anathema to John Sheppard and even Joe.

What he wasn't initially prepared for was the onslaught of sexual desires and fetishes that came out of left field. As an active he'd been imprinted with personalities along pretty much the entire range of the Kinsey scale and some probably even outside of it. So many imprints had been designed to respond to very detailed, specific, and deviant sexual fantasies, kinks, and fetishes, so it shouldn't have been a surprise that random things turned John on at random times, but it was.

During one particularly boring command meeting, John had found himself suddenly and fiercely aroused by the way Lorne was flipping his pen. Over and over and over again. (Thanks, imprint of college student who was the boy toy for a cougar college psych professor who was fascinated by the cachet of sleeping with a programmable human.)

Another time, when Stackhouse was delivering a particularly vicious dressing down to a group of marines who, in a fit of boredom, had pulled a very creative (but dangerous) prank on Dr. Kusanagi, John had almost blurted out, "Pick me!" when Stackhouse asked who wanted to be taken out to the wood shed and whipped first.

After a particularly harrowing moment when Zelenka accidentally burned John with an electrical spark in the lab and John almost sank to his knees in front of Zelenka, he developed a system: every night before bed, he would take some time to himself and meditate, check in with each imprint, and get to know it better. What did he (or she - one time he'd been transgender) like to do for fun? What did they hate? What did they fear? Any medical conditions? What turned them on?

There was so much to know that John was tempted to start a book, but between the architect with the photographic memory and the law clerk with the eidetic memory, John had it all covered. His personalities would warn him when something was a turn on, and he would either get himself together or conveniently excuse himself from the situation until he could get himself to settle down.

And life on Atlantis was once more smooth sailing, as smooth sailing as it could be in a war with the Wraith and anyone else who happened to be pissed off at Atlantis or its residents for whatever reason.

So John was pretty confident about himself when he stepped through the gate on a routine first contact mission. He was pissed off more than panicked when some locals got the jump on him and Ronon, but Rodney and Teyla escaped, so they'd be rescued in no time. He and Ronon were bound, blindfolded, and best as John could tell, thrown into separate holding cells. He let the blind pianist imprint get a feel for the place - dimensions, no windows, no breeze, no source of warmth/light, so they were probably underground. He let the physicist with a sense of absolute time keep track of how long he'd been underground, how long it had been since he'd stepped through the gate, and how long it would be till his team was considered overdue and a rescue would be organized. He also set the law clerk with the eidetic memory to reciting a book he'd once read, just to keep things entertaining. Underneath it all, the blind pianist was listening for the sounds of movement, breathing, other life, anything that meant either danger or rescue.

But then the pianist got distracted by the law clerk, and John about had a heart attack when cool breath scrolled past his ear and someone whispered,

"Stay quiet. We're here to get you out."

The sound sent shivers tingling down his spine, through his fingertips, in his toes, in his _brain_. It went beyond surprise, beyond the sensation of breath on his skin (breath play, favorite of the blind pianist, by the way).

"It's me, Rodney," he whispered, and then quick fingers loosed the blindfold (the architect's fetish; irony considering his photographic memory).

"Teyla's getting Ronon. We have to be very, very quiet."

John kept his eyes closed but nodded, slowly eased himself to his feet so the pins and needles in his limbs wouldn't make him trip and fall. Beside him, Rodney kept whispering: instructions, how he and Teyla made it back to the gate, how worried Elizabeth was, who else was on the rescue mission.

And the tingles cascaded faster and faster through John's body, and his brain felt like it was on fire, and if it was possible for him to have an orgasm in his brain, it was about to happen, he couldn't stop it –

 _It's called ASMR_ , the college student said, because the last class he ever remembered taking was a high level psych class (taught by the professor who wanted to sleep with him). _It's the whispering. Get a hold of yourself. It's not sexual. You're fine._

But John had never felt this before. He was floundering. He was – he let the NSA agent take over, the one the Dollhouse deployed whenever there was a doll-related emergency they needed to keep under wraps.

When they finally made it to the surface, Lorne and his team plus an extra contingent of marines were there, as Rodney had promised, and to John's immense relief, they could speak at normal volume again.

"Bounty hunters, sir," Lorne said grimly. "After the gene. They had some kind of breeding program they were going to sell you to."

Rodney muttered, "Kirk."

The NSA agent stepped aside, and John re-asserted himself smoothly. "What about Ronon? He doesn't have the gene."

"They were going to use him as a bargaining chip to get another one of us who's a natural gene carrier," Lorne said, frowning, because he was a natural gene carrier. Atlantis considered him John's second-in-command due to his strength with the gene (but Lorne didn't know that part, because no one really knew that John talked to Atlantis sometimes).

"Thanks for finding us," John said. "I hadn't quite worked out my escape plan."

"You're welcome," Rodney said, and his acerbic tone was a welcome break from the whispering. "Next time, don't let them get the drop on you. Some super soldier you are."

"Hey, I never said I was Captain America." John was glad when he saw Ronon standing with Teyla, checking over his gun to make sure their captors hadn't damaged it.

Back in Atlantis, John submitted to a medical examination with aplomb. He wasn't surprised when Beckett told him he was fine, if a little scraped and bruised from being banged around before he'd been jailed. Beckett recommended one day of stand down before returning to active duty, and John was more than okay with that, because he had a problem to solve.

He skipped dinner on account of having been punched in the stomach and not feeling too good (they'd left in the morning and were home by dinner; really not a bad day, by Pegasus standards) and went straight to his quarters. He asked Atlantis to close the door behind him and lock it so no one except Elizabeth or Lorne could get in, and then he sat down on the edge of his bed. He closed his eyes and took deep breaths (thanks, granola-munching hippie English teacher who liked to meditate). He scanned through the imprints, through the information he'd collected. He'd catalogued them all now, he was sure.

Which one of them had ASMR?

None of them. That was something that was - his. That belonged to his body, to his new composite identity, to Foxtrot John Sheppard. Joe didn't recall ever experiencing the sensation, and neither did John Sheppard the imprint. This was his and his alone. The college student ponied up everything he knew about the condition, which wasn't a lot. Dare John ask Heightmeyer about it?

The biggest problem, of course, was that Rodney triggered the response. Did anyone else? It wasn't like John could wander around asking random people to whisper to him. What could he do the next time they were on a mission that demanded whispering? The NSA agent was trained for a lot of things, but fighting Wraith wasn't one of them, and riding backseat or even shotgun for a Stargate Command officer didn't constitute training.

This wasn't the first time Rodney had whispered to him. Maybe it has been the totality of the circumstances, letting the blind pianist heighten his hearing, the fact that he was blindfolded. Surely this reaction would have occurred before now, so he could deal with it.

This was the first time since Thelan, since Foxtrot John Sheppard had been born, since the composite event had been fully processed, that Rodney had whispered to him.

 _What should I do?_ John asked.

Joe had the answer. _Go to him._

John's immediate response in the negative was automatic, reflexive. Hooking up with Rodney - with anyone - on the expedition was absurd. He was the military commander, second-in-command if anything happened to Elizabeth. Random hookups with people who were all basically in his chain of command, military or not, were a disastrous idea.

 _Who says it has to be a random, one-time hook-up?_ Joe asked.

The other imprints surged to life with overwhelming force and a single, sharp reminder. _Chaya._

John couldn't do that, couldn't risk that with Rodney. Couldn't risk the heartbreak.

Rodney was one of his best friends, his teammates. Even though Rodney was loudly bisexual (and proud of Canada for being much more open-minded than its atavistic neighbor to the south), he was in a relationship with Katie Brown, and it just wasn't an option.

Until it was.

Until years later, when Rodney was sick, Rodney was dying. John sat beside him in the infirmary, and they whispered to each other, fireworks going off in John's brain. It was cruel, it was unfair, but John told him everything. About the dollhouse, and his imprints, and everything he was. Even though Rodney's memory was fading, he understood it, and he sympathized with John, mourned with John. Rodney wouldn't remember any of this the next day, and in a few days he'd be dead, and John's secret would die with him.

"You're in love with me?" Rodney asked, voice soft with awe and wonder.

"Yeah," John said. "I am."

"I love you too," Rodney whispered. "All of you. Every piece of you. I don't care what they did to you."

John's heart soared so high it would surely shatter when it fell, but he pulled Rodney into his arms and held him tight. "Thank you." They stayed like that for a long time until Rodney fell asleep, and sleep wiped away his memory.

John lowered him gently to the infirmary cot, and, broken-hearted, he walked back to his own quarters.

When Ronon offered a solution to Rodney's problem, a chance for a lucid goodbye, John was terrified all over again, because what if Rodney remembered what John had told him? And what if Rodney, the real Rodney, in full possession of his faculties and understanding what kind of a freak John was, didn't feel the same way? But Rodney temporarily cured also had no memory of what had transpired since the illness got the better of him, and then John was desperate to help Keller with a more permanent cure, and at the end of the day, Rodney was alive and whole, and inside John, the imprints were weeping.

Rodney was in love with Keller, and John was his faithful, supportive best friend, but sometimes, when he and Rodney were sitting on the balcony watching the stars, he'd whisper to Rodney, and Rodney didn't know why, but he would whisper back.


End file.
